Dept. of Bizarre Coincidence:
the domain name
saudi-binladin-group.com
was registered
on October 27 to Chris Curry of Studio City, CA.
According to a Howard Altman article
in Wired News, Mr. Curry is a Web site designer who had originally purchased the
domain name for resale. He subsequently decided to use the domain name
for a site to distribute information about the bin Laden family. The
still-incomplete site has been receiving 13,000 hits per day.

Previously the domain name had belonged to the Saudi Binladin Group,
the bin Laden family conglomerate. The bin Ladin family has officially
denounced Osama bin Laden.

What makes this story remarkable is the date on which the Saudi Binladin
Group annual registration of the domain name expired: September 11th, 2001.
The registration was not renewed and so the domain name became available to be
registered by Mr. Curry.

This tends to indicate that the Saudi Binladin Group site at was only supposed
to exist for one year, from September 11, 2000 to September 11th, 2001. As
every Webmaster knows, you had better renew your annual domain name registration well
before it expires or you can suffer consequences ranging from disruption of access
to having someone else register the name immediately once it expires.
The decision to not to renew the registration was probably made before,
not after, September 11th.

There is no reason to suspect anything more than a coincidence here, but this
sure is an odd one.

It's the death penalty, stupid.
Responding to a reporter's questions about the extradition of
terrorist suspects from Spain during a White House
Photo-Op
on Monday, George W. Bush said that he was "not the least bit concerned"
that U.S. allies are balking at administration plans to prosecute
suspected terrorists before military tribunals. "It is the right
decision to make and I will explain that to any leader who asks",
said Mr. Bush.

Mr. Bush does have some explaining to do, but not necessarily about
military tribunals. This according to Spanish Prime Minister Jose Mariz
Aznar, who visited the NY Stock Exchange this morning and paused
for a live interview with a CNBC reporter. The reporter asked about
the extradition to the U.S. of eleven suspects arrested in Spain,
for whom there was evidence of direct links to Osama Bin Laden.

Prime Minister Aznar replied that should the U.S. request the
extradition of these suspects, the request would be honored in compliance
with Spanish law. He said that military tribunals per se would not
be a reason for the denial of an extradition request, but that
the suspects would not be extradited if they were subject to the
death penalty.

So according to the Prime Minister, it's not the military tribunals
but rather the possible imposition of a death sentence that might prohibit
our allies, properly, from extraditing terrorism suspects to the U.S. No civilized
country utilizes judicial killing as a mechanism of social control.
Perhaps it's time for the United States to join the ranks of
civilized nations, if only for reasons of expediency.

The World War II military tribunal prosecuted American citizens,
according to a U.S. Coast Guard
article
about Operation Pastorious, the Nazi sabotage attempt. Here is how it
describes the recruitment of the eight men who would later be prosecuted
by a secret military tribunal:

Two naturalized citizens and six Germans who had lived in America for varying lengths
of time were chosen to undertake a crash course in sabotage.

Mr. Bush's military order
establishing the institution that William Safire too-kindly
called a
"Star Chamber" is limited to "any individual who is not a United States citizen".
But what if an American citizen is suspected of involvement in terrorist activity?

The stated argument in support of Bush's edict is that secret military tribunals are
necessary to protect against retaliation and the exposure of U.S. intelligence. If
that is the case, then there is no logical reason why citizens suspected of terrorist
activity should be treated differently from non-citizens facing similar suspicions.

That is why it's significant that the World War II military tribunal cited most often
as a precedent for Bush's order apparently prosecuted American citizens. There may
be another shoe yet to drop.

Finally, why did I call Safire's "Star Chamber" reference too kind? Because the original
Star Chamber was at least a
somewhat civilized institution, in that it was not able to impose a death penalty. Bush's
secret military tribunal is under no such constraint, and it deserves Safire's more accurate
epithet,
kangaroo court.

Was the WWII secret military tribunal fair? An exchange with
direct bearing on this question took place yesterday on NBC's Meet The Press.
Tim Russert was the host, and guests for this segment were Senator
Patrick Leahy, (D-Vt.) and Senator Richard Shelby, (R-Ala.). From
the official transcript,
about 43 minutes in:

SEN. LEAHY: Sure. And look what happened in that. It turned out years
and years and years later that J. Edgar Hoover kept secret information
that would have exonerated a couple of the people being held. And why?
Because he didn't want to embarrass his own FBI agency. He didn't want
to embarrass his own name, because Congress was thinking of giving him,
J. Edgar Hoover, a medal at that time.

So he kept this secret and nobody ever found out about it afterward.
I'm not sure that's the-sort of like the interment of the Japanese-Americans
- probably not the best thing that what he did.